21–24 of 24 posts
What, no FF Chartwell? http://tktype.com/chartwell.php As long as you can turn on ligatures in your font rendering API per-platform, this is a fully cross-platform solution to graphing, in a font file. (Using printf's, basically, to do complicated graphs - absurd and awesome!)
Hinting and the Web
Webfonts are not currently offered.Anyone interested in using Icon Fonts should definitely check out [1] - it allows you to generate and download icon fonts by selecting vectors from different packs. [1] http://icomoon.io/app/
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icomoon/kppingdhha...
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The better question is what does this gain you over a vector format.
It's supported in places where a vector format is not (namely, older versions of IE that don't support SVG). Plus, icons are easier to handle as a regular text/font asset, than as SVG, and you can use all the tools available for web typography for them. That said, why we never had a simple vector _IMAGE_ format for the web is beyond me. By which, I mean a simple format to display vector images at various sizes, a sim…
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And the answer to that question is autohinting and (not on iOS) subpixel AA.
How well hinted are the common icon fonts, actually? Given that many (if not most) freely-available typefaces are actually not hinted at all I'd be a bit skeptical. Autohinting doesn't really produce very convincing results for typefaces, I wouldn't expect it to do wonders with images either.
Subpixel rendering is, of course, very helpful. It's really preposterous though that we have to resort to abusing fonts to get subpixel when implementing it for arbitrary vector rendering is so straightforward.
The other big problem with using fonts for hinting support is that people have differing opinions on the value of hinting for fonts, but everyone would probably agree on the value of hinting for icons. If you disable hinting because it hurts your eyes (or because you use OS X and don't have a choice), then you're going to miss out on icon hinting as well.
Seems to me what we really need is a client side solution for rendering arbitrary SVG with either manual hinting or icon-optimized autohinting (which might be too general of a concept to be doable).